학술논문

Metric and Path-Connectedness Properties of the Frechet Distance for Paths and Graphs
Document Type
Working Paper
Source
Subject
Computer Science - Computational Geometry
Mathematics - Geometric Topology
Language
Abstract
The Frechet distance is often used to measure distances between paths, with applications in areas ranging from map matching to GPS trajectory analysis to handwriting recognition. More recently, the Frechet distance has been generalized to a distance between two copies of the same graph embedded or immersed in a metric space; this more general setting opens up a wide range of more complex applications in graph analysis. In this paper, we initiate a study of some of the fundamental topological properties of spaces of paths and of graphs mapped to R^n under the Frechet distance, in an effort to lay the theoretical groundwork for understanding how these distances can be used in practice. In particular, we prove whether or not these spaces, and the metric balls therein, are path-connected.
Comment: 12 pages, 6 figures. Published in the 2023 Canadian Conference on Computational Geometry